


Amazing Grace, Part Three

by itstonedme



Series: Amazing Grace [3]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-08-03
Updated: 2009-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-14 22:41:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itstonedme/pseuds/itstonedme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Depression-era AU in the U.S. southeast.  A migrant comes upon a teenage boy and his father living in rural Tennessee.  Originally posted on LJ in August 2009 <a href="http://itstonedme.livejournal.com/23518.html#cutid1">here</a> with reader comments.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: A work of fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amazing Grace, Part Three

Daybreak brought a restful night's peace to Orlando, although he noted wryly that he awoke for the second straight day to the smell of chicken shit. Once again, he took his meal on the back porch, an enormous breakfast that Elijah had prepared, of eggs and ham with pan gravy over skillet-fried corn bread and pecan pancakes. Orlando thanked Elijah when he was handed his plate but said little else; Elijah didn't look like he'd slept well from what Orlando could see, his face puffy and pale, his eyes red, and he didn't have much to say. Orlando had been around people enough to know that all lives were complicated and private and none of his business, although he was troubled by what he saw, and saddened. 

This morning, however, the old man came out onto the porch to eat with Orlando, explaining how the work would be done. He'd already marked his trees earlier in the week, and Elijah had shimmied up and stripped each trunk of sizable branches on the side it would fall. There were four trees, all of them mature chestnuts on the edges of the woods where they could be brought down without too much trouble and then split to rebuild and extend the penned areas. 

It proved to be exhausting labour. By ten a.m., they had felled their first tree, a sixty footer with a true trunk that would yield a sizable amount of saleable timber. Systematically, they set about removing the branches, stripping the usable limbs and stacking the refuse nearby. Using rope and chain, Elijah secured the severed branches in bundles that the horse would be able to handle while his father and Orlando finished clearing the trunk. Orlando and the old man began the backbreaking task of dividing the trunk with a two-handled saw while Elijah set off to harness the mare and lead her back. 

The wood was hard, and the cuts went slowly. The old man was surprisingly strong, stronger than Orlando; but he was respectful enough when he saw Orlando tiring to call for a break, and he tidied up while Orlando drew from his canteen and rested. By the time Elijah returned with the horse, the trunk had been cut in four places and the process of peeling the bark begun. When they broke at noon for a packed lunch of bread and ham, it was clear to Orlando that given the workload, he could be here for the week, if that's what he wanted.

He looked over at Elijah, whose thin shirt clung to the sweat on his back, the jigsawed curls sticking humidly at the nape of his neck. At that moment, Elijah glanced up at Orlando. The remnants of a dismal night's passage were disappearing from eyes that flashed behind wire-rimmed lenses. All at once, his face joyously split into a gap-toothed grin around an unbecoming mouthful of sandwich.

But it was more than welcome to Orlando who decided, all things considered, that a week's detour on a Blue Ridge homestead was easily what he wanted.

*

That first day, they worked until just shy of sundown, hauling each trunk length back to the yard, where it was wedged, split and stacked into piles to keep and piles to sell. Orlando sawed several rails into posts while the old man augered post holes so that the pen could be enlarged, and together they began the process of slipping the rails between the uprights once they'd been planted. Elijah headed into the house to fix dinner a half hour before they stopped, but their meal-taking was a lethargic affair, consumed outdoors where it was cooler. Afterwards, Orlando stripped off his clothes at the washstand out back of the barn, washing himself completely before changing his shirt once more and freshening the one he'd worn that day, pinning it to dry.

Twilight had bled into dusk by the time Elijah passed back through the barn to feed the pigs and replenish the feed and water station for the mare. He'd lost track of Orlando because of his tasks indoors; he figured from the quiet about the barn that Orlando'd taken a walk to the outhouse. Thus, when he idly hoisted the lamp to peer into the end stall, his heart tripped to find Orlando's prone figure lying on his blanket-made bed, mouth open and fast asleep. Elijah quickly swung the light away for fear of waking him, and stepped back, setting it on the wooden floor of the walk through. Quietly, he returned to the stall and gathered the blanket that Orlando had hung on the side rail that morning, carefully draping it over him. Orlando made a noise but nothing more. Elijah turned to leave. 

"..spoiling me," Orlando mumbled, smacking his lips. 

"I didn't mean to wake you," Elijah whispered, looking over his shoulder. 

"...not awake."

Elijah frowned, then smiled. "Yes, you are. You're talking."

"No, I will. I said I would." 

Elijah realized that Orlando was indeed asleep, so exhausted from his day's labors that part of his mind was unable to rouse from wherever his dreams had taken him. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said self-consciously.

"...sweet dreams, 'Lij...like you very much."

Elijah's smile faded away. "I like you too, Orli," he said awkwardly and, collecting the lantern, he slipped away quickly, shuttering the barn doors behind him.

*

Orlando rested the ax handle against the paddock fence and passed Elijah his water flask. "Can I ask you why your dad's enlarging the paddock?" 

The day had begun much like the one before: an early start, a tree felled by midmorning, a break at noon after hauling the timber back to the yard, then splitting, stacking and erecting another span of fencing. 

Elijah's eyes darted to where his father was replacing several worn rails on the far side of the pigs' pen. "You didn't ask him that yourself, did you?" He accepted the drink, but his eyes darted back to Orlando anxiously. 

Orlando frowned and tracked Elijah's eyeline. "Round about. He didn't really answer." 

The easiest way to keep something secret was without help, or so Elijah had been taught by his nan, but despite that, the temptation to share his feelings with someone seemingly sympathetic was too sharp to suppress. "He's got this idea that he's going to board walkers, maybe even breed 'em," Elijah said under his breath. 

"Walkers?"

"The kind o' horse we have," Elijah explained, nodding towards the chestnut mare drowsing on three legs in the shade of a great oak near the paddock. He handed back the canteen. 

Given that the few homesteads Orlando had noticed in these parts didn't appear to have enough income to feed a family let alone a horse, he still replied, "Well, a man's got to have something to aim for." 

Elijah glanced at his father, then voiced Orlando's thoughts. "Ain't no one could afford it."

"Maybe he knows someone who might," Orlando offered.

Elijah knew then that a prudent tongue would have served him better. "I shouldn't of said nothing," he said abruptly and suddenly busied himself. "I shouldn't of talked of him." He bent to fidget a wedge that had been tapped into the butt end of a trunk length. 

Orlando pressed his lips together, considering how the moment had changed. He took another swig from his flask and watched Elijah fuss with the log. Orlando found Elijah bound by a fearful reluctance to be anything other than dutiful and solemn, that he could only see the dire certainty of a single outcome, never more positive options. Orlando wondered if that happened because Elijah's options had been removed, not only by circumstance but by his father's overbearing authority. 

Because it was no secret that the old man's sour command hadn't been saved just for Orlando. Orlando could see that Elijah felt its edge noticeably and often, despite his efforts to placate the man. 

Orlando pocketed the flask. "That looks like it'll split true. Give it a whack." He handed Elijah the sledgehammer.

The pin sank straight, sending a perfect split up from the base, and Orlando crouched and tapped several more wedges into place along the rift. "You know, it's okay to be concerned about your father's plan," he said quietly, careful of each word as he snugged the wedges with a mallet. "You aren't being disrespectful by voicing that." Elijah kept fidgeting with the tools, but Orlando knew he was listening. "You're allowed your privacy, your thoughts. And it's okay to share them with people you think you can talk to." 

"It was gossip," Elijah mumbled, picking up the sledgehammer.

"Well, yes it was," Orlando conceded. "But fuck, Elijah," he said, moving his head closer, "gossiping about one's old man comes with being sixteen."

"Seventeen!" Elijah hissed despite being taken aback by the cussword, part of him thrilling to it. 

"Even more so, then," Orlando said. "I'll bet I'd gone a few rounds with my old man by the time I was seventeen. Not that I didn't deserve it sometimes. But every pup's gotta test the big dog, you know?"

Elijah looked at him.

Orlando raised his eyebrows and smirked. "It's nature, mate. Like getting a hard on. No point in fighting it."

Elijah's eyes grew huge before he blinked, turned furiously red and burst out in a nervous bark of laughter. He quickly covered his mouth and glanced over at this father. 

"What?" Orlando chuckled. "You don't get hard ons in this part of the country? Or you just don't talk about them?" 

Elijah hadn't relaxed in the company of an age mate -- or someone close to it -- since he'd quit Grade 6 and now, between the profanity and the mention of what had always been an unspeakable matter, he was at a loss as to what to say.

So he giggled instead.

"Oh, mate," Orlando laughed because Elijah's giggle was both reward and heartwarming, "in some quarters, that's all seventeen-year-old blokes ever talk about, their dicks. Whose is biggest, whose has made the rounds the most, who can jerk off the farthest, the longest, the loudest, and it's all lies, right? Hand me another wedge." 

Elijah obliged, swallowing his laughter where it worked for a bit and then burst out of him in such a gust, he farted at the same time.

Orlando's brows arched again and he snorted as he laughed. 

"Shit, shit," Elijah cursed, failing as he attempted to suppress his laughter; he abruptly stood up, his knees angling inwards furiously. 

The old man turned and looked at them. His brows furrowed, but one side of his mouth turned up.

Elijah threw his work gloves and wedges into the dust and turned towards the path. "Be back," he hurried, leaving Orlando to chuckle at his retreat.

* 

The day's work ended an hour earlier than the day previous, largely because they had started the week with the trees furthest out, and the job of hauling would now grow progressively shorter as the week wore on.

Dinner was a light meal of pan bread, what the garden provided, and cider put away from the year before, and on this night, they all ate together on the back porch. Afterwards, the old man took his knife from his pocket and a length of basswood from the wood box, and set once more to create a pile of curls between his boots.

Orlando sat beside him on the porch floor, his back to the wall. He leaned over, pulling his harmonica from his pack, and held it up. "Mind?" he asked. 

"Go right ahead," the old man replied. 

Orlando blew a pleasant melody, not uptempo, but not mournful either. In the kitchen, Elijah migrated from his chores to the back screen door.

"Pleasant, ain't it," his old man told him through the screen.

"Yessir," Elijah replied and listened a bit. "You ever play anything?" he asked.

"Not me. Your ma's ma back in Iowa played a little piano, but that was afore your time. Your ma a little too." 

It had been too long since Elijah had heard talk of his roots, not since his sister had left, and he knew not to look for anything more. "It's nice," he said evenly. 

"It is that," the old man replied, the knife absently snicking each stroke, and two decades evaporated in his mind's eye.


End file.
